http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
THE hysteria over AIDS, which once made rational
conversation about it impossible, has subsided. But the
voodoo beat goes on.

The United Nations declared
war on AIDS this week with its
usual pop-gun bravado, as if the
world's most famous bureaucracy
has the power to make "war" on
anything.

The delegates to "the first-ever
international initiative"
accomplished a high-sounding
declaration of war on a disease
that has so far killed 22 million
persons throughout the world,
dwarfed by the numbers taken by cancer and heart disease,
and adopted the usual bowl of alphabet soup to describe
their program.

However, nobody wants to contribute the $3.2 billion to
get it started, to say nothing of the $9.2 billion the United
Nations wants by the year 2005. That may not buy a vaccine,
but it will buy a lot of bureaucrats.

Nobody wants to put up that kind of money, in part
because almost nobody has that kind of money, and no doubt
because a lot of the delegates are counting on pressuring the
United States, as usual, to come up with that kind of money.
More than 160 nations sent delegates, but so far only a
half-dozen nations and a few private foundations have
pledged $645 million.

The United Nations estimates that 36 million people are
HIV-positive or suffering from AIDS at present, and 25
million are in Africa, where AIDS will kill 100 million within
the next decade.

All of this may be true. Or some of it may be true.
Nobody knows. What the United Nations is trying to do is
reprise the hysteria of a decade ago when, we were
confidently told, everyone would be dead by now. Life
magazine headlined a 1985 cover story "Now no one is safe
from AIDS." Masters and Johnson warned that the unwary
could contract AIDS from toilet seats and the famous sex
therapist Helen Singer Kaplan, noting that condoms don't
really protect anyone, confidently told us that kissing, even if
not on a toilet seat, carries a risk of AIDS. Basketball
superstar Magic Johnson, who boasted that he had bedded
half the women east and west of the Mississippi but nary a
man east or west, was held up as proof that you could get
AIDS through heterosexual frolic. Oprah Winfrey said 60
million Americans would be dead of AIDS by 1990.

Anyone who scoffed at any of this was marked down as
ignorant, hateful, homophobic, or all three. When this
newspaper examined the wild claims and quoted
public-health officials as saying they were bunk, we were
swamped with angry calls. A prominent physician-researcher
in tropical medicine called to say that even if the stories were
not true we should print them anyway, as a warning. Many
bookstores refused to stock Michael Fumento's book, "The
Myth of Heterosexual AIDS," in deference to the emotional
sensibilities of homosexual activists. (It became a best seller,
anyway.) Discover magazine took considerable heat when it
debunked the claims with a cover story concluding that AIDS
would likely remain "largely the fatal price one can pay for
anal intercourse." It was a civic duty to regard smoking as a
form of suicide, but mean and hateful to warn that sodomy
was folly. Everyone knew this, as researchers would tell us
privately, but it was suicide to say so in public. The Reagan
administration, unable to take the heat, finally dumped so
much government money into research that researchers with a
respect for science warned that the abundant money was
tempting good researchers into blind alleys.

John Tierney recounts in the New York Times the sad
story of Dr. Stephen Joseph, the commissioner of health in
New York City in 1988. The city had estimated that 400,000
New Yorkers carried the AIDS virus, and Dr. Joseph, after
examining the evidence, cut the estimate in half. Overnight the
facts threatened the fiction. His office was occupied by AIDS
"activists," his home spray-painted with ugly graffiti. He got
death threats. Ten years on and it turns out that Dr. Joseph
was, in fact, wrong: The number of AIDS cases diagnosed in
New York through the year 2000 is not 400,000, or even
200,000, but little more than 100,000.

And yet The Washington Post op-ed page is at it again,
conjuring doom. Under the headline, "We All Have AIDS,"
one Dr. David Berwick, a vice president of something called
Healthcare, argues that unless the pharmaceutical companies
give away AIDS medicines everyone in Africa will die. He
describes what's happening there, where unprotected
male-to-male anal sex is endemic, as "a Holocaust every two
years," as if Africans are being thrown onto trains and
transported to concentration camps where everyone is forced
into gay (if not always happy) orgies.

AIDS is a horrific disease, and Africa needs a lot of help
from grown-ups. But it doesn't need the
hysteria.